The Humans
Director: Robert Zemeckis.
Writers: Robert Zemeckis. Bob Gale.
Cinematographer: Dean Cundy.
Cast: Michael J. Fox. Christopher Lloyd. Thomas F. Wilson. Lea Thompson. Elizabeth Shue. James Tolkan.
Back to the Future II: Does it Work?
Here’s where I’ll get ripped. No, it doesn’t work. Back to the Future II takes everything from the first film and tries to one-up it, revisiting things from the original and not leaving stuff well enough alone. With the film bouncing back and forth from the mid 80’s to 2015 and back to the mid 50’s there’s a lot of opportunities to revisit previous moments and a lot more to create a vision of what the world would look like thirty years down the road.
A lot of opportunities.
But it simply collapses under its own weight and how gimmicky so many of the ideas are, visual gags that when piled on top of each other distract from the perfectly simple story told in the original. Back to the Future isn’t Primer. It’s not even Time After Time [still my favorite time travel flick]. It doesn’t need to be. It needs to stay nestled in the comfort zone created by the original.
Back to the Future II: Why it Doesn’t Work.
Marty McFly and Doc Brown are a really good duo, especially when Michael J. Fox is able to be charismatic and effortlessly witty. Doc Brown, even though he’s screaming and bugging his eyes out even more this time around (because subtlety was shitcanned for this installment) is still a delightful movie character and possibly the best one the vastly underappreciated Christopher Lloyd has ever had [though Taxi‘s Reverend Jim is in a class all his own]. These great characters spend the majority of this film either dealing with massive expository scenes about time paradoxes and not changing history [which leads to some dreadful scenes, especially one where Marty tries to get a sports almanac back from first Biff and then James Tolkan’s Mr. Strickland]. It’s a bore and though many complained that the intricate plot made the story convoluted, it’s not rocket science. It’s just not good. Worse yet, we get to see Michael J. Fox lay down the template for Eddie Murphy as he very poorly portrays different family members, including a very horrible female incarnation, as seen below…
…and this nightmare:
On top of that we get a mentally challenged future Marty. It’s not the intricate time travel plot that’s at fault, it’s the sheer overload of bad ideas. Between the future concepts that seem more akin to the satirical tone of Total Recall or Robocop and the shameless Pepsi and Texaco plugs, my head was spinning. The Jaws 19 joke with its cutesy Spielberg jab, it’s just wrong.
Worse yet, by rehashing or overselling familiar aspects from the first film here not only is the nostalgia value scuttled, it makes those moments cheaper.
Back to the Future II: All These Years Later.
There’s one thing that stands out in this film, something that I never gave much notice to during its run (I only saw this film in theater once and on VHS once) and that is the stellar work being done by Thomas F. Wilson as Biff and his various relatives and incarnations. Classic sci-fi tales are often only as good as their villains and Wilson does really good work and oftentimes under heavy prosthetics. He ‘gets’ the tone and is larger than life and wholly willing to make a fool of himself and as a result he rises above the material. His work is truly great stuff.
Otherwise, there’s just a lot of stuff here that is too clever for its own good. The big hoverboard set piece is awful, and the image of Marty McFly helpless above the water futilely trying to paddle is symbolic for the tone of this whole movie. From the lame diner sequence with the Ronald Reagan/Ayatollah/Michael Jackson Max Headroom ‘waiters’ to the kitsch they chose to personify the era, it all makes me glad that in the real 2010 we’ve avoided becoming their vision of futurefolk.
Back to the Future II: What is its Legacy?
Its legacy is that it’s a guilty party in the long line of sequels that got bloated. With more money and more eyeballs peeking, Robert Zemeckis and his gang stripped the warmth and fun from the franchise-to-be and turned it into a mess that despite having some good little moments is essentially a waste of time.
Back to the Future was all we needed. There is nothing about this film that indicates the kind of sequel that works. It’s the same damn story as the first movie, but without the nuance and intimacy.
